• A quest for wholeness, hope, resilience, or harmony. Spirituality, religion, and recovery
Many people find immense value in cultivating their spirituality to strengthen recovery. There can be many reasons for this. Engaging in spirituality can sometimes bring a feeling of connectedness to something bigger than oneself. It can provide a way of coping in addition to personal emotional resilience. Spirituality can also provide a sense of direction, purpose, and meaning. Such an experience can be a source of motivation for navigating recovery. Another positive aspect of many faith traditions is a sense of community. While the stated focus in most faith traditions tends to be a specific deity or deities, this connection to community can be a valuable source of social support. This sense of community is powerful. Those who have found aspects of 12-step recovery programs to be unhelpful still often describe the sense of community and increased social supports as positive. Just as people may have experienced benefits from spirituality and religion in their recovery, many also have experienced harm, traumas, and abuses from spiritual frameworks and religious institutions that can present significant barriers to recovery. For example: • Dismissive or invalidating experiences with spiritual or religious authority figures regarding mental health or substance use concerns. • Messages about worth, good and evil, and sin and salvation can foster feelings of shame, alienation, and fear of judgment. • Experience of unethical treatment practices. • Isolation and breaking ties with social supports not approved by the framework or institution. • Only one right way approaches to recovery or salvation. • Hierarchical power structure in which leaders promote powerlessness in followers. • Punishment or shunning for non-adherence to doctrine. • No redress, restoration, or healing from inflicted harms and abuse. It is important to understand that a person’s relationship to spirituality and religion is highly personal and varied. Just as it is critical for the certified peer specialist to provide validation and affirmation for people who benefit from a spiritual or religious framework, it is equally necessary for certified peer specialists to validate and affirm those who have experienced harm or trauma because of such frameworks or institutions.
206
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online